Chapter Text
Chapter 5
In Which the City Refuses to Behave, Tea Defies Meteorology, and a Great Many Forms Are Filled Incorrectly on Purpose
Dawn dragged itself up the alleys like a tired cat with a burlap sack of weather in its teeth. The river rolled over and changed sides. Bread rose, pigeons considered ethics, and the city - being so very used to mornings that happened to it - happened right back. The sky was the bruised color of an excuse, the streets sweated yesterday’s cabbage, and someone was frying something that sounded crispy in a pan that sounded resentful.
In the attic under the eaves that never agreed on where “down” was, Nell sat in the middle of a chalk circle that had been drawn with good intentions and a slightly blunt box of laundry blue. She looked twenty in the way a lit match looks a moment old: full of brightness with opinions about oxygen. Her hat had once been a respectable cone, but time, weather, and personality had married in it and spawned a dangerously jaunty brim.
On the floor: a kettle, a jam jar with air bubbles that wouldn’t leave, a spool of municipal red tape (self-knitting), a teaspoon that insisted it was a wand, three small storms in paper bags, and a manual titled Local Miracles and Contingency Planning, Third Revised and Immediately Obsolete Edition.
The kettle - Mr. Scree - hummed a scale in sympathetic boil, though he wasn’t near the stove. He liked to hum before big events. Kettles are narwhals in the seas of anxiety; you can tell the size of the wave by the keening.
“Right,” Nell told the kettle. “Today we fix the city.”
Mr. Scree’s lid chattered a phrase that could have been “again.”
“Don’t start,” she said, and pinned her hair with a safety pin that had a temper. “If the Enumerators finish their census of improbabilities, they’ll file the place into an index card. No one wants to live on an index card. No windows.”
Enumerators - pinched little metaphysical creatures in brittle suits with clipboards made of the seconds you drop between words - had been seen lately, ticking off birds, checking the height of puddles, verifying if dogs that looked like their owners counted as a single civic entity. They smelled faintly of eraser shavings. They smiled in ways that encouraged you to stop doing whatever you were doing forever.
It had started (officially) three days ago when Nell, attempting to register a Minor Public Blessing (the pigeons stopped aiming; it was transformative), had accidentally requested a Preliminary City-Wide Rationalization under the Bureau of Plausibility. The form for Blessing, as anyone knows, sits immediately next to Rationalization because of the way filing clerks think vowels are garnish. She had tried to withdraw it. The counter had said “Stamp received; the wheels are turning,” and when the wheels turn you hear them in your bones.
The first day, everyone’s laundry dried in alphabetical order.
The second day, the fishmongers got organized and fish began turning up with labels like “phlogiston-adjacent - Not For Stews,” which was helpful until customers asked what “phlogiston” meant and the fish had opinions.
Today was day three, and the thirteenth chime was rumored. Not the extra hour the city keeps for itself in case of emergencies - no, the thirteenth chime, the one that tidies your past until it fits in a single line and leaves your future with a “see appendix.”¹
Nell got up and smoothed her skirt, which tried to wrinkle itself into a map to places that sold buns. “Plan,” she said. “We need a jam of civic contradictions. We need help. We need the sort of noise you can’t put on a form.” She pocketed the teaspoon wand (it sulked, but spoons are adaptable), slung Mr. Scree into a basket lined with potholders knitted by someone with a grudge against corners, and grabbed the three paper-bag storms. Never know when you’ll need a breeze.
She opened the attic hatch and stepped into a morning that smelled of toast, damp brick, and poetry written by someone with cold hands.
Down the ladder, across the hallway with the plaster cracks shaped like advice, out onto the street where the stones glistened with last night’s apologies. The city was awake: cart wheels muttering philosophy, hawkers hawking, watchmen watching, and the unblinking bureaucratic eye trying to blink. Already she could see one of the Enumerators at the corner attempting to measure the distance between “here” and “there” with a ruler that sobbed. It ticked in a pen made of disciplined wind.
“Good morning,” Nell told it. Always parley with reality before you pickpocket it.
“Is it?” said the Enumerator, not looking up. Ticks escaped the nib, ran down the page, and dried in tidy rows. “Define.”
“Not today,” said Nell, and walked on before the definition could happen to her.
She cut through Scuttle Lane, which had never managed to be wide enough, being too full of itself, and arrived at the market. It had made an effort. Stalls lined up as if auditioning for a parade. Signs were spelled correctly, even the ones that didn’t want to be. Eel-on-a-stick vendors wore matching aprons that said Eel, Singular, and the eels, in their tubs, pretended to be unrelated.
At the corner, Gravel the traffic troll stood with his little red-and-green flags. Gravel was the color of old bread, with a smile that made children decide to be policemen when they grew up and then decide not to when they met a policeman and preferred Gravel. His cap - polite, square - sat very seriously on his head. He liked rules; he liked them the way a gardener likes fences: not to stop things so much as to keep them from wandering off and getting eaten by goats.
“Morning, Nell,” Gravel rumbled. “You look like trouble dressed up as a solution.” He tried to smile; a flint sparked; a pigeon blessed him and flew away swearing.
“I need a parade,” she said. “A parade that is also a protest but looks like a picnic. We’re going to swarm the bell tower before it chimes.”
Gravel twitched his green flag. “Permits?”
“I’ll have a permit,” said Nell, “as long as no one checks it closely or from any angle.”
“Ah,” said Gravel. “A civic mayfly.” He squinted past her at the market where a man was selling jars of sunlight (“Yesterday’s, Unopened”). “You’ll be wanting Tess,” he added.
Tess ran things that didn’t want to be run and unionized things that didn’t know they were working. She had hair like a broom and opinions like doors. Right now she sat on a barrel that had been requisitioned by sitting on it, surrounded by a delegation of seamstresses, fishwives, and a woman who sold under-the-counter sausages that were so over-the-counter you could smell them in the next street. Tess’s eyes swept the stall fronts and came back with change.
“Nell,” she said. “I’ve had three Enumerators try to classify my left hand as a contraband counting device. If this is because you ticked a box that looked friendly, say so.”
“I ticked with vigor,” Nell admitted. “But I’ve got a fix.”
“Does it involve fire?”
“Only symbolically,” said Nell, then glanced at the paper-bag storms in her basket. “Mostly.”
“We don’t do symbolic fire,” said Tess. “We tried it once. The fire unionized.”
“Look,” Nell said, “they want the city to be sensible. We’re going to give it sense so overflowing it gives up. We bring contradictions. We bring noise. We bring everything that can’t be totaled. I need musicians who can’t agree on a key, a baker who decorates with opinions, a choir that hums on purpose, and somebody who can argue with a clock and win.”
“Clocksmith Jory,” Tess said. “He bit time once. Time apologized.”
“Good,” said Nell. “And we’ll need the wizards.”
There was a collective exhale that smelled of pickles and “oh no, them.”
“Not because they’ll help,” Nell rushed on. “Because they’ll get in the way very colorfully, and that’s useful. Also someone has to catch whatever falls off the tower.”
Gravel nodded. “I’ll hold the street,” he said. “My flags are ready to be unhelpful in the right direction.”
“Parade in ten,” Tess announced, at which a hundred women who had not been waiting for instructions began to move in ways that suggested they had expected instructions all their lives and now that they had them, the city would experience efficient destiny.
From the archway of a nearby bakery stumbled two familiar academics: one brandishing an umbrella indoors as though it were a doctorate (Professor Slightly), the other coaxing a biscuit into orderly collapse with tea (Professor Bumbleshoot).
“We’re supervising,” Slightly declared.
“We’re documenting,” said Bumbleshoot, ink already smudged across his spectacles.
Wizards always join parades. They just refuse to admit that’s what they’re doing.
Nell piped across the market toward the university with two notes and a hope. The wizards, in their pointy hats and pointier opinions, were bunched under the arch discussing an equation that wanted to be an anecdote when it grew up, in front of a sign that politely requested No Thaumic Littering. A junior wizard with hair like a startled theory spotted her: Pelham, Lecturer In Something With Diagrams. He had a face built to argue with footnotes.
“Oh no,” Pelham said, as if she were a weather system he had read about in a cautionary paper. “You.” He pointed a finger that tried to be authoritative and came off enthusiastic. “We have the situation under almost-qualified assessment. The Chancellor has convened a subcommittee.”
“Brilliant,” said Nell. “You can form a line and look important behind it. We’re going to the bell tower.”
“The thirteenth chime,” Pelham said, eyes gleaming like someone who wanted to publish it, “is a harmonic artifact of the temporal belfry. If we can capture it in a jar - ”
“If anyone brings a jar,” Nell said, “it will be for biscuits. Come on.” She shooed him with her hat brim. Junior wizards, if handled briskly, stay buoyant.
The parade happened because people needed an excuse to walk loudly, and Nell provided one. Musicians boiled up - fiddles in argument with drums, a flute that had learned breathing from geese. Out of a drain on the corner came Chairman Sawtooth and a contingent of rats. Each carried a scrap of paper that declared FAIR BAIT FOR ALL in handwriting too small for humans but very clear to rats. They marched in neat lines, tails flicking percussion against the cobbles. Rats are excellent at parades: they know when to scatter and when to swarm, and they never miss a beat. Bakers brought trays of sugar sculptures shaped like things that couldn’t be eaten but wanted to be admired. The choir hummed in a key that was in hiding from the other keys. Somewhere between the fiddlers and bakers, a rogue bouquet trotted happily: the Aromatheron, still smelling of regret, onions, and riverbanks. It had acquired a garland of frying-oil smoke and a secondhand carnation from a passing stall. No one stopped it; it was too well-scented to argue with, and besides, it looked as if it had unionized with the street vendors. Gravel held up his green flag to stop the flow and his red flag to start it because, frankly, the flags had their own ideas and he wasn’t about to argue.
As they went, the city tried to shuffle them into columns and failed, and that failure was precisely the point. Enumerators hovered like correction fluid. They asked for receipts. They got crumbs. They balanced pencils on their lips and invented sighs of new shapes.
At Widders Square, Nell paused. Legends paused here too, sometimes for breath; the square lent air to big moments for a small fee. The clock tower loomed at the far end, its face wearing the smug look of things that know where they’ll be in a minute. The thirteenth bell sat high up and invisible, the way all the persuasive bells do.
“Listen,” Nell said, and people did, because people listen to someone who is about to break a rule for them. “The city’s made of favors and feuds, bits of string, river fog, and a recipe no one wrote down correctly. The Enumerators are trying to make it correct. We do not allow that. We remind the city it is not an index card. We make the air so thick with uncountables that counting gets embarrassed and goes home.”
A hum went through the crowd, the sort that started in the chest, wandered into the throat, and came out as brisk laughter.
“On three,” Nell said, and then didn’t say three, because she was the sort of person who knew that chaos arrived when invited and also when it wasn’t, and so she took off in a run instead.
Up the tower steps, spiral and argumentative, the parade climbed after her, shedding crumbs, opinions, and a small number of proprieties. The steps complained about feet that had more purpose than they were built for. Mr. Scree rattled in his basket, whistling a panicked tea-song.
Halfway up, they met an Enumerator, this one taller and narrower, wearing a sash that said Senior Tangibility Auditor. It held out a palm.
“Permit,” it said, a word with a thousand silent letters.
Nell reached into her pocket and produced a piece of paper with stamps that looked official from a distance and broke into a joke up close. The Enumerator peered. Its eyes were the color of subtraction.
“No,” it said.
“Ah,” said Nell, and flicked open one of the paper-bag storms. A gust of fresh confusion tore the sash at a strictly ninety-degree angle. The Enumerator’s pencil snapped in dismay. People surged past like the future.
At the next bend in the stairwell, Petromella Shanks appeared, her cape disciplining the draft into sharp corners. She joined the climb without asking, broom at the ready.
“Only because chaos is dreadful for repeat business,” she told Nell, voice dry enough to sand furniture.
Nell smiled sweetly, which in witch meant I heard you, I won’t thank you, and therefore we’re even.
On the landing, Goodwife Prill waited with arms like furniture. She was a village witch who had moved into the city reluctantly and had met Nell the way you meet falling pianos: suddenly and with feelings. She valued order. Nell valued orders of buns. Their meetings achieved a certain balance.
“You brought a mob,” Prill said.
“They brought themselves,” Nell said.
Prill’s eyes took in the kettle, the storms, the flustered wizard trying to straighten his hat without removing it from his head. “You’re going to do something theatrical,” she said flatly.
“Yes,” said Nell.
Prill sniffed. “Good. Sensible is a disease. We’ll inoculate.” She had a broom. It had learned to be a spear in its off hours.
They reached the top. The bell - vast, brass, certain of its job - hung above, the city sprawled below like an open brief. In the streets, Enumerators gathered as white as bleached sunlight. The air tightened with an invisible click as the tower’s gearworks ran a finger down the spine of the hour.
Pelham fussed a little chalk out of his sleeve and drew symbols that tried to form a committee and failed. “We can counter-resonate,” he said, “apply a sequenced - ”
“No,” said Nell. “We’re not fighting the chime. We’re embarrassing it.”
Below, the Enumerators shuffled their papers in dismay. Their rulers bent; their clipboards leaked seconds. Finally they sighed, stamped one another for closure, and reclassified Ankh-Morpork under Unclassifiable: See Miscellaneous. Then they folded themselves into their own filing cabinets and trundled away, smelling faintly of eraser shavings and defeat. The city breathed out, untidy and triumphant.
“Embarrassing,” Pelham repeated, in the tone of a man introduced to a new field of mathematics that involved blushes.
Nell upended her basket. Out clinked the teaspoon, Mr. Scree, the storms, and a bag of a dozen peppermints because you never know. She placed the kettle at the tower’s edge, facing the city. “You are going to boil,” she told Mr. Scree, “at a carefully irresponsible moment. When you do, whistle like an opera house falling into a tailor’s shop.”
Mr. Scree quivered. He liked directions.
Nell tossed the teaspoon into the air. It glinted, spun, and landed on its back with the stubborn grace of objects that refuse to be elegant even when watched. She clapped her palms. “All right! Musicians, wrong tune! Choir, hum whatever you had for breakfast! Bakers, declare your buns tax-exempt! Wizards, argue about terminology! Gravel - wave both flags! Tess - organize disorder!”
“What are you doing?” Pelham asked. He always asked just before he learned. It was a gift.
“Creating a civic chorus,” Nell said. “Against a single note.”
The city inhaled. You could feel the lungful of it in your soles.
Down below, people forgot to be tall or short and were just people. Market stalls shrugged and scooted an inch to the left, either because of wind or defiance. Dogs chose names. A woman arguing with a price tag threw the tag out. The river, fickle thing, decided to be generous and carried back a dozen hats. The sun, which had been under obligations to shine at a measurable rate, flickered in a way that delighted tomatoes.
The Enumerators frowned and fanned themselves with blank forms. Their numbers - beautiful, sharp - began to look like the teeth of a comb that had combed a storm.
Nell unrolled the spool of municipal red tape. It writhed, sought a bureaucracy to belong to, and, finding none fulfilling, tied itself around the bell clapper in a very official knot. She grinned up at it. “Permit denied,” she told the bell.
Pelham drew breath for a protest. Prill swatted him with the broom so gently that only his dignity spilled.
“Positions!” Tess called, because if there was one thing she loved more than a plan it was the moment the plan admitted it had to improvise. The choir swelled. The fiddles quarreled. Drums pounded in hungover solidarity. Gravel’s flags blurred.
Nell popped the second paper-bag storm and sprinkled it into the wind. It smelled like the seaside a hundred miles from any sea, like the promises of summer you made to yourself and kept because someone had to. The third storm she held, trembling, in both hands.
“Mr. Scree,” she whispered. “Now.”
The kettle whistled.
It was not a sound made by metal and water. It was a sound made by a city remembering. It was prams and weddings and a bread oven first used; it was alley laughter and the first time you got away with something and decided to use your power responsibly later, maybe, probably; it was two hands lifting a table together and finding it lighter. It filled the tower and sloshed down the stairs and slipped under doors to ask cats to move.
The bell tried to chime.
The red tape refused to let the clapper behave.
The thirteenth note hit the tape like a very well-written law meeting a cake and became, with surprising speed, a thirteenish noise: not a tone but a tangle. It skittered around looking for the tidy resonance it had been promised, found instead a market arguing amiably with itself, and - to its faint credit - attempted to adapt.
Nell threw the last storm into the bell mouth.
Wind surged through the tower. It grabbed the awkward not-quite-chime and ran away with it, taking it across rooftops where laundry smacked its hands like applause, past chimneys that coughed and pretended they hadn’t, through the labyrinthine court where decisions go to change their shoes, and out over the river. The noise tried to become a rule. The river laughed - rivers are unsympathetic to rules - and swallowed it whole, then hiccuped.
Down below, the Enumerators, faced with a chime that could not be documented, tallied, or made to behave, ran through their procedures with increasing despair. At last, they gathered themselves, produced a very large form labeled Surrender to the Indeterminate, stamped it a hundred times with a stamp that read Pending, and faded like very polite fog.
The bell - confused, handsome - settled back into being a bell. It chimed twelve, then, unable to resist, chimed a half. Half a chime sounds like a wink.
The city exhaled. A child dropped a toffee and caught it before it hit the ground and later told everyone this had been magic and it was. Bakers raised spatulas. Dogs forgot their names and remembered who they were. Market stalls leaned into the sun. The smell of cabbage decided to be cheerful and achieved it.
“Is that it?” Pelham asked, dazed. “Did we - was that - ?”
“That,” said Prill, “was a recipe. She salted it with people.” Her broom, unable to resist the mood, wagged its straw.
Nell stared out over the rooftops and felt the way you feel after a storm: lighter and damp and a bit suspicious of skies. She put a hand on Mr. Scree, whose whistle wound down into a satisfied mutter. “We’ll have to fill forms about this,” she said, with the air of someone who knows a debt when it arrives.
“Let’s fill them wrong,” said Tess, who had clambered up with a dozen women in skirts designed to create updrafts. She set a tray of buns on the parapet as if that were what parapets were for. “We’ll file the city under ‘Full of Itself and We Like It That Way.’”
“You can’t file like under way,” Pelham said, purely out of habit, and then grinned with all the teeth he usually saved for lectures. “I retract that. File it under buns.”
Gravel appeared, modestly enormous, carrying three children, a goat, and a traffic cone like a bouquet. “No injuries,” he reported with pride. “Except to the cone, who regrets nothing.”
There was, of course, the matter of consequences. There are always consequences. They trickle in after triumph like distant relatives who heard there was cake. The Bureau of Plausibility sent a letter in triplicate that said, in sum, Don’t do that, and included a helpful pamphlet on the dangers of civic whimsy. The pamphlet made fine kindling and then, unexpectedly, excellent jam pot labels. The Enumerators were spotted, days later, trying to classify clouds and being gently bullied into nap time by weather.
Nell went home by the long way that took her past “her” streets - the ones that tipped their hats as she passed, the alleys that cracked their knuckles at danger and then offered it a sandwich, the stoops that held little piles of this and that with tags reading “Take if you need, return if you can.” The city was itself again, which is to say: it was itself for the first time since breakfast and would be again by lunch.
Her attic, when she climbed into it, smelled of hot dust and kettle metal and the particular satisfaction of objects that have been used properly and then forgiven for being themselves. She set Mr. Scree on his shelf. He sighed like a poem that had found its last stanza.
On the table lay a letter written on paper that had a watermark of a very serious goose. Nell opened it. The handwriting was crisp and apologetic.
Dear Citizen,
In recognition of your role in preventing a catastrophic over-application of Sense, the Office of Bells, Whistles, and Consequence-Management hereby fines you one (1) minor transgression for Disturbing the Chime and grants you one (1) Major Citywide Favor to be redeemed at your discretion in matters affecting the common good. Please sign below if you agree that you agree.
P.S. Your permit application for a Minor Public Blessing has been approved retroactively. Please accept, on behalf of the city, a basket of very polite pigeons.
There was, in fact, a basket. It cooed apologetically. The pigeons wore little tags that read Corrected Behavior and were practicing not doing things on statues.
Nell frowned at the letter. Major favors were dangerous, like wishes wearing suits. She didn’t trust them. On the other hand, she thought of streets that flooded when it rained sideways, roofs that leaked in syllables, the meat pie seller on Candle Row who had a limp and a knife for a tongue, and she thought: favors, carefully, could be spent like candles.
She signed. The paper purred and folded itself into a hat for the nearest pigeon, who accepted it gravely.
The door creaked.
“Enter,” Nell called, and a head popped in. Pelham again, hair in negotiations with gravity, hat clutched like a confession.
“I brought biscuits,” he said, “because every theory is improved by biscuits.” He set a tin on the table. “Also, the Chancellor wishes to know how you did that.”
“Tell him,” said Nell, opening the tin (biscuits: the wheel reinvented, but better), “that I read the manual.”
Pelham peered at the manual on the table and read the title, lips moving. “Local Miracles and Contingency Planning, Third Revised and Immediately Obsolete Edition.”
“Not that one,” Nell said. She tapped her chest. “This one.”
Pelham - bless him - took that seriously. “That edition,” he said, “comes out different every time.”
“Exactly,” she said.
He looked around. The attic was a mess of the sort that categorizes itself by ambient impertinence. He looked down. He looked up. “So,” he said, “would you like a job?”
“I have a job,” Nell said. “It involves preventing people from doing what they shouldn’t do unless they should do it but carefully.”
“A title, then,” he said, eager. “Titles help the university understand why it pays for biscuits.”
“Hmm,” Nell said, eating a biscuit to consult the crumbs. “Consulting Nonconformist.”
Pelham’s grin cracked wider. “Done,” he said, as if the university were something that could be persuaded with words like that, which it was, especially if you added biscuits.
He left. The kettle hummed. The pigeons practiced virtue. Nell leaned back in her chair. The city leaned with her, subtly, because witches and cities have arrangements no one puts on signs. She used the Major Favor, not then but over the next week, here and there, a brick at a time: a drain unclogged that no one owned, a widow’s stair fixed at midnight so it stopped counting her misses, a lantern in the alley that made shadows behave.
She went back to market days with Tess and tea with Prill and arguments with Pelham in which he lost face and gained friends. Gravel, resplendent, taught her to wave flags upside down on purpose. The Enumerators, when they appeared, kept an embarrassed distance and checked their clipboards for onions.
The bell tower, at noon, chimed twelve and a little more, just enough to remind people they had time to be ridiculous. The river complained and consented. The city did not behave. If you asked someone what had happened on the day the thirteenth chime failed, they would tell you the kettle story, and then they would tell you about buns, and then they would tell you about everything else but you would understand.
One evening, as summer ran low and late light got caught on the nails of roofs, Nell sat on her windowsill. The pigeons had been returned to normal (they had asked; virtue tired them), the kettle behaved (mostly), and the manual stayed purposely obsolete (on principle). The wind brought up a sound from below: argument, reconciliation, frying. From somewhere, faintly, laughter tossed like coins into a fountain.
“Right, then,” she said to the sky. “Who’s next?”
The city shivered in agreeable anticipation. It would be somebody. It always was.
Nell set her hat on the sill, watched it decide not to fall, and laughed. You cannot put that on a form however many copies you make.
And that, as any local will tell you, is the point.
That evening, Nell’s attic exhaled like a cat settling into sleep. The broom collapsed into its cushion with a noise of scandalized relief, the frying pan sang a shanty half a note too proud of itself, and Mr. Scree the kettle hummed lullabies to nobody in particular. Outside, the city sulked in its ordinary way - alive, argumentative, defiantly uncountable. For now, that was victory enough.
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¹ No one who has ever filed an appendix has checked if it was attached to anything.